Research Articles

King's Meat Market and Grocery sits on the northern end of the Broad Street bridge in the midcity section of New Orleans. When storeowner Mike Tran returned to King's six weeks after Hurricane Katrina, he found only a shell of what once was.

This Article takes the form of a letter from Gulf Coast Katrina social justice advocates. Specifically, the Letter is addressed to those who work for social justice after a disaster strikes. This is our attempt to tell you some of our stories and some of the lessons we learned from our experiences with Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the summer of 2005.

This final product explores how expressions of the solidarity economy function as social innovations with the potential to transform the economic status quo and promote economic democracy.

Despite highly specialised and capable emergency management systems, ordinary citizens are usually
first on the scene in an emergency or disaster, and remain long after official services have ceased.

If we think of Hurricane Sandy as the extreme weather that hit the New York City region on October 29, 2012, then the storm was one of the worst in the country’s history, killing dozens of people, affecting hundreds of thousands, and inflicting as much as $75 billion in economic losses.

The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified existing injustices in the United States, which is exemplified in Ypsilanti, Michigan. However, the pandemic also provides an opportunity to re-imagine existing ways of being in the world, and mutual aid networks that have provided for people's basic needs during multiple crises while also working towards more radical change provide an opportunity for social workers to examine their relationship to “helping.” The author uses their personal experience with a local mutual aid network to examine the power and possibility of mutual aid, particularly in times of crisis, as well as sources of social work resistance to decentralized and non-professional forms of helping and caring.

When central authority fails in socially crucial tasks, mutual aid, solidarity, and grassroots organization frequently arise as people take up slack on the basis of informal networks and civil society organizations.

In New Orleans, in late summer 2008, commemoration of the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina was punctuated by preparations for Hurricane Gustav.

The hazards and disasters field routinely emphasizes that there is no such thing as a natural disaster. This is a nod to the fact that environmental disasters are caused by the human actions or inactions intersecting with the occurrence of a natural hazard, e.g. hurricane, fire, earthquake. This essay argues that the disaster literature can help us understand the causes and consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic but only if we consider the pandemic as a disaster and its profound impacts as outcomes of racial capitalism.

Resilience has been criticised in many fields for focusing on attempts to bounce back or maintain the status quo following a disturbance.

Mutual aid is the fundamental basis of all human societies, an understanding that is exemplified with striking clarity during times of crises. The coronavirus pandemic has brought the caring geographies of mutual aid into sharp relief with the failings of both capitalism and the state.

How do people behave when disasters strike? Popular media accounts
depict panic and cruelty, but in fact individuals often cooperate with and care for one another during crises. I summarize evidence for such
'catastrophe compassion', discuss its roots, and consider how it might be cultivated in more mundane times.

Many New Orleans residents who were displaced in 2005 by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the subsequent levee failures and floods are still displaced. Living with long-term stress related to loss of family, community, jobs, and social security as well as the continuous struggle for a decent life in unsettled life circumstances, they manifest what we are calling “chronic disaster syndrome.”

In this document we put forward eight simple but important “best practice” insights from psychological science to help people come to terms and cope with the profound implications of climate change, so that they can stay engaged with the problem, see where their own behaviour plays a part, and participate in speedy societal change to restore a safe climate

Research has been conducted to gather and evaluate experiences of marginalized communities impacted by climatological or natural disaster events. Results from this study can help inform, update, or create new and more-inclusive DRR policies that recognize the experiences and needs of minority communities, and improve outcomes for these individuals.

Hierarchical control models have dominated organizational structures for thousands of years. Increasingly, the power of distributed organizations for performing complex tasks is becoming apparent. The strength of centralized decision making systems lies in consistency, continuity, and availability of resources. However, the inherent structure which leads to these strengths also limits the ability to respond to highly complex information. In this paper we explore the strength of the Occupy Sandy mutual aid organization.

This report addresses a key aspect of the nation’s response to COVID-19:
the hyper-local, spontaneous efforts of communities. These efforts
do not reflect the traditional ‘helper and helped’ relationship, which
prevails in public services and the formal charity sector. They obey the
deeper obligations of mutualism: free citizens combining to protect their
communities, and the most vulnerable, against a threat to all.

Five years ago, the Arab Spring reclaimed public spaces across the Middle East and North Africa, demonstrating to a new generation the possibilities for creative resistance and political imagination under even the most repressive circumstances.

Within hours of Hurricane Katrina's landfall, social justice organizers joined millions of Americans in responding to the humanitarian crisis precipitated by the storm. In addition to mobilizing to meet basic needs, however, organizers sought to cultivate a collective, political response to what they framed as government malfeasance before, during, and after the hurricane.

The beginnings of the COVID-19 pandemic caused panic over job losses, food and toiletry shortages, and social isolation, over and above the health impacts of the virus. People wanted to help on a mass scale and there was a huge community response. The pandemic brought energy into neighbourhoods and communities, leading to the rapid formation of mutual aid groups in many different forms all over the country.

This course ties together ideas and evidence about resilience. How do we keep ourselves and our children resilient in the challenging period of an unknown future catastrophe?

Climate change disproportionately impacts communities already challenged by structural oppression. Many mainstream resilience planning efforts focus on physical infrastructure. These efforts have, in many cases led to displacement through the phenomenon of Green Gentrification. An alternative framework of climate resilient design and planning considers the role of place attachment, social capital, and local knowledge in disaster resilience, here referred to as relational infrastructure.

Writing collectively from the relative privilege of our (often precarious) homes, we sketch out a space to reflect on the centrality of housing and home to the Covid-19 crisis.

Human behaviour, particularly the neo-liberal economic system that values unlimited growth and unsustainable extraction of natural resources, is contributing to climate volatility and exacerbating disaster risk.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, networks of community organizers and activists mobilized to support their neighbors as part of mutual aid groups across the United States. Emergent community response is a common phenomenon during crisis, but mutual aid in the pandemic took on a distinct character, drawing on traditions of political and community organizing. Our research into these activities suggests that mutual aid organizing in relation to disaster is growing practice but remains evolving and contested.

The central theme of these reflection is that although the Katrina disaster offers abundant evidence of how crisis creates ideal opportunities for intensified economic exploitation, what has since then come to be called “disaster capitalism,” and also for increased repression, brutality and ethnic cleansing, which might be called “disaster fascism,” it also creates the conditions for an extraordinary flourishing of mutual aid, solidarity and communal cooperation, something we might call “disaster anarchism.”

This article takes the notion of the ‘disaster utopia’ as a starting point for reconsidering the impact of the Japanese triple disaster of 11 March 2011 (3/11). It has often been observed that disasters may lead to utopian longings for a better world, and that these may, in some cases, lead to long-term social and political change.

Calls from the climate change community and a more widespread concern for human security have reawakened the interest of geographers and others in disaster politics. A legacy of geographical research on the political causes and consequences of disaster is reviewed and built on to formulate a framework for the analysis of post-disaster political space.

Why do large-scale disasters produce such mentally healthy conditions?
What therapeutic principles can we derive from a study of the natural human adjustments that develop among disaster survivors?

This paper highlights a variety of studies on disaster recovery and reconstruction, some showing that political, economic, and social change is unlikely after disasters; some showing that change occurs frequently after disasters; and still others showing that both are true, depending on who you are.

Scholars have highlighted the role of disturbance and crisis in enabling systemic change towards sustainability. For example, disasters can, under some circumstances, serve as catalysts of such change.

Attributions of panic are almost exclusively directed at members of the general public. Here, we inquire into the relationships between elites and panic. We review current research and theorizing about panic, including problems of identifying when it has occurred. We propose three relationships: elites fearing panic, elites causing panic and elites panicking.

Spontaneous responses by self-organizing, “emergent” voluntary groups and individuals are a common feature of urban disasters. Their activities include search and rescue, transporting and distributing relief supplies, and providing food and drink to victims and emergency workers.

We develop questions for a COVID-19 research agenda from the anthropology of disasters to study the production of pandemic
as a feature of the normatively accepted societal state of affairs. We encourage an applied study of the pandemic that recognizes it as the product of connections between people, with their social systems, nonhumans, and the material world more broadly, with attention to root causes, (post)colonialism and capitalism, multispecies networks, the politics of knowledge, gifts and mutual aid, and the work of recovery.

Droughts, floods and other natural catastrophes related to climate change belong to a class of global risks that have downstream effects on the economy and productivity of settlements, social cohesion and administrational institutions. This represents growing challenges for adaptation strategies and disaster management.

Disaster associated with natural hazards can lead to important changes—positive or negative—in socio-ecological systems. When disasters occur, much attention is given to the direct disaster impacts as well as relief and recovery operations. Although this focus is important, it is noteworthy that there has been little research on the characteristics and progress of change induced by disasters.

Climate change affects the health of all Americans - right now. There are no exceptions. Although needed adaptation will reduce risks for all, only prompt, significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions will stave off a crescendoing public health emergency. Children, the elderly, and those with pre-existing conditions or who are socially the most vulnerable will be the most susceptible to the ravages of climate change.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on the norms, patterns, and power structures in the United States that privilege certain groups of people over others. This article describes COVID-19 as an unprecedented catalyst for social transformation that underscores the need for multilevel and cross-sectoral solutions to address systemic changes to improve health equity for all.

The current health crisis, triggered by the spread of COVID-19, has mobilized activist groups and individuals within social movements worldwide to respond with actions of solidarity and mutual aid. In Greece, during the lockdown between March and May 2020, several mutual aid initiatives emerged in Athens to offer support to those who needed it.

How to respond quickly, effectively, and sensitively to large-scale crises is debated at length in the aid sector. Institutional focuses on projects and outcomes have led to abundant literature on the efficacy of external interventions, while the actions of individuals and communities to meet their own needs remain under researched. This paper seeks to close the gap by joining global trends and specific case studies to explore the scale, breadth, and characteristics of citizen and community-led responses to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020–21.

This article provides an interdisciplinary examination of race and gender
intersectionality in the context of disaster “recovery” in New Orleans.
Based on a case study of a grassroots relief organization, the Common
Ground Collective, the findings demonstrate that in the absence of intersectional practice, sexism furthers racism and racism furthers sexism.

Gender and disaster scholars note that during and after disaster traditional gender roles and patterns can be either exaggerated or subverted. The temporary dissolution of normal life can facilitate the reversion to extreme forms of the gender binary or, conversely, the transgression of normative arrangements and production of new opportunities for gendered practice.

This thesis explores the experiences and practices of disaster relief volunteers. This thesis is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a period of fifty-three days in the summer of 2007 at the post-hurricane Katrina Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, Louisiana.

This is the manuscript of a guest lecture I gave in MIT 3874G: Disaster Capitalism, a course designed and delivered by Dr. Warren Steele of the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. The theme for the day’s lecture was ‘Exit Strategies.’

Faced with an onslaught of disasters, government mismanagement of
life-threatening crises, and the injustices of colonialism, Puerto Rican
communities have bet on their own survival. Their mutual aid efforts testify
to both the power of grassroots organizing and the scale of state neglect.

Prisons, jails, and detention facilities, by definition, are designed to isolate and separate people from their communities. To challenge and upend carcerality requires not just dismantlement, but radical revisioning, a building – of flourishing, free and caring communities. Collectively developed responses and resources for people and ecosystems, led by those with lived experience of oppression, are the foundation for a world without prisons.

For years, I have been sad about how mutual aid rarely gets taught in classes about social change and social movements. It is such a vital part of movement building and transformation, and often very mobilizing for students to learn about it. I hope this will be changing as the concept of mutual aid is circulating more. I made a Teaching Guide to go with my new book about mutual aid being published by Verso Books in October, wanted to share now in case anyone is considering the book for fall syllabi.

I’m teaching a class this fall at University of Chicago called Queer and Trans Mutual Aid for Survival and Mobilization. Here is the syllabus. I will be posting the discussion questions and class exercises for each week here, so you can use them if you are reading along alone or in a reading group.

Between March and June 2020, residents in north London faced the
Covid-19 pandemic by creating neighbourhood Mutual Aid groups
on WhatsApp and Facebook. These groups not only addressed
basic survival needs such as bringing groceries and medicines to
infected people, the elderly, and other vulnerable populations in
quarantine; they also offered opportunities for social interactions
between strangers living in the same neighbourhood during lockdown. Their success was linked to their rapid mobilization, adaptability and local knowledge.

Disasters are becoming more frequent and destructive while the consequences for incarcerated persons have grown increasingly visible. Simultaneously, scholars, individuals, and communities are grappling with police brutality and systemic anti-Black racism in the criminal legal system by engaging with the concept of abolition. In this article we demonstrate that these issues are not disconnected and argue that the abolition of the prison industrial complex (PIC) would mitigate the impacts of disasters for incarcerated persons and their communities.

The focus of discussion about the ethical issues associated with the COVID-19 pandemic has been on the great suffering to which it has given rise. However, there may be some unexpected positive outcomes that also emerge from the global disaster.

My paper looks at the use of communication technologies by Occupy Sandy, a relief network developed initially by Occupy Wall Street activists to address the devastation of Hurricane Sandy.

St. Augustine Church, widely regarded as the oldest African-American church in the country, was slated for closure only six months after Hurricane Katrina. Since its opening, St. Augustine has always been a vital cultural nexus in the city's Afro-Creole community, and closing the parish at a time when it was most needed would have been a devastating blow.

A pervasive sense of uncertainty permeates individual and collective life today. The
political economic, cultural, infrastructural, and environmental changes, neoliberal
development ushers in, manufacture insecurity at scales stretching from the molecular to the
global.

One of the most obvious problems for those involved with disaster relief work is coordination with other teams in the field, with headquarters, with the mother organization in the home country and having to deal with unanticipated situations. The central dilemma appears to be this: disaster relief workers either have the knowledge to know what to do or the authority to do it.

This critical discourse analysis of the American Red Cross (ARC) interrogates the discourses of situated ARC stakeholders following their participation in the 2005 hurricane disaster relief efforts. The author uses critical discourse analysis as a guiding theoretical framework and method of analysis to reflect on how the language and practices of the ARC, on a variety of levels, normalizes Whiteness and maintains White privilege.

Rooted in a participatory action research framework, this is an in depth
exploration of two mutual aid disaster relief organizations: Common Ground and Occupy Sandy, and what makes their approach distinctive and effective.

The year 2015 marked the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall just outside of New Orleans on August 29, 2005. Critical narratives point to the glaring racial and economic inequality that contextualized the catastrophe. However, most Katrina discourse has been limited by its neglect of intersectional feminist analysis. In this article I introduce a model for making intersectional sense of Hurricane Katrina with lessons for the study of other disasters.

Care has reentered the zeitgeist. In the immediate aftermath of the 2016
US presidential election, op-eds on #selfcare exploded across media platforms. But for all the popular focus on self-care rituals, new collective
movements have also emerged in which moral imperatives to act — to
care — are a central driving force.

When we, the editors of this special issue, decided on the theme of politics, radical philosophy, and climate change, we had not imagined that we would complete this project in a time of pandemic, a crisis that seems on “fast forward” as compared to the “slow violence” of the climate crisis.

This paper’s purpose is to develop a concept of radical resilience. We do so by drawing from both agonistic and anarchist planning theory. Radical resilience exists when people mobilize their ability to manage their affairs for themselves. This ability often emerges following an agonistic conflict with a governing power.

Can professional caregivers respond to the needs of the individuals and families who face life threatening experiences, or "crises," such as the effects of chemical waste in Love Canal, the nuclear explosion on Three Mile Island, the hostage taking in Iran, the volcanic destruction of Mount Saint Helens, or the crash of a DC-lO airplane in Chicago?

Emmett Till's body arrived home in Chicago in September 1955. White racists in Mississippi had tortured, mutilated, and killed the young 14-year-old African-American boy for whistling at a white woman. Determined to make visible the horribly mangled face and twisted body of the child as an expression of racial hatred and killing, Mamie Till, the boy's mother, insisted that the coffin, interred at the A.A. Ranier Funeral Parlor on the South Side of Chicago, be left open for four long days.

The World Trade Center attack, though constituting an unprecedented disaster, nevertheless generated many of the features seen in other disasters in the U.S. Such features include the convergence of volunteers and donations of supplies, which are welldocumented in the literature.

Community gardens have historically played an important role in the social–ecological resilience of New York City (NYC). These public-access communal gardens not only support flora and fauna to enhance food security and ecosystem services, but also foster communities of practice which nurture the restorative and communal aspects of this civic ecology practice. A

Resilience has fast become a popular catchphrase used by government, international finance organisations, NGOs, community groups and activists all over the globe. Despite its widespread use, there remains confusion over what resilience is and the purpose it serves.

In North American cities, a great deal of effort is needed to enhance equity-centered climate resilience. To date, most community resilience work focuses on identifying and managing vulnerability and risk through top-down approaches that often fail to meaningfully include equity-centered strategies considering the most vulnerable populations.

On September 19th, 1985, at 7:14 a.m. an earthquake reaching a magnitude of 8.1 on the Richter scale and lasting almost two full minutes hit the coast of Mexico

Using our professional experiences with natural disaster relief, as well as existing theory, the authors introduce an equity-oriented framework—Social Justice Disaster Relief, Counseling, and Advocacy.

In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the concept of mutual aid was rapidly taken up as an ideal model for solidarity. This paper examines why mutual aid may have found such popularity in this moment by examining the affective underpinnings of risk, vulnerability and the imperative to care. Rather than celebrate the turn to mutual aid as the best path towards justice, however, the paper suggests that we think strategically about the models we use for survival, by considering mutual aid as one strategy among many for generating our responses to the harms that predate, and are intensified through, the pandemic

As a scholar on social movement democracy and an activist scholar working on neighbourhood relations, we are curious about the political and transformative potential of solidarity in action during this crisis. Hence, we analyse different initiatives of mutual aid during the pandemic in our city

This paper focuses on Mutual Aid Disaster Relief (MADR), a grassroots organization providing natural disaster relief rooted in the principles of mutual aid and autonomous direct action. Through participant-observation of a series of workshops and semi-structured interviews with activists and organizers, this research explores why it is that individuals are motivated to act within this grassroots network, as opposed to participating in other efforts in response to natural disasters.

In the current political moment in the United States, defined by climate
crisis, increased border enforcement, attacks on public benefits, expansive carceral control, rising housing costs, and growing white right-wing
populism, leftist social movement activists and organizations face two
particular challenges that, though not new, are urgent.

The Superstorm Research Lab (SRL) is a mutual aid research and writing collective working to understand the changes in how New York City policy actors, NGO leaders, activists, volunteers, and residents are thinking about social, economic and environmental issues following Hurricane Sandy.

Mutual-aid communities are normally built voluntarily in disaster-struck areas. Similar kinds of communities formed after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. In this case, calls for collaboration between all Japanese people such as Ganbaro Nippon (“carry on, Japan” or “hang in there, Japan”) appeared on posters and stickers in towns throughout the country.

Although not always recognized as such, catastrophes are complicated systems that are built on the social production of vulnerability. This thesis considers how responses to catastrophes are usually built on an oversimplified understanding of what they are, and argues that more nuanced, multi-faceted understandings of catastrophes can guide us to more effective solutions.

Can bottom-up relief efforts lead to recovery after disasters? Conventional wisdom and contemporary public policy suggest that major crises require centralized authority to provide disaster relief goods. Using a novel set of comprehensive donation and expenditure data collected from archival records, this paper examines a bottom-up relief effort following one of the most devastating natural disasters of the nineteenth century: the Chicago Fire of 1871.

“We have all experienced the devastating effects of natural and unnatural disasters in America.” So began a speaker at a post-Hurricane Sandy rally at Zuccotti Park on July 31, 2013, recalling two previous disasters that the audience knew well: the World Trade Center attack of September 11, 2001, and Hurricane Katrina’s flooding of New Orleans on August 29, 2005

Many groups and agencies have a vital need of accurate information on how people behave during disasters. This article presents information which seems to have particular pertinence for disaster preparedness, control, and amelioration

This article provides an analysis of Occupy Sandy – a New York-based activist organization that was formed in response to superstorm Sandy in October 2012 – in order to demonstrate what we might
learn from its emergency (im)mobilities. Specifically, it suggests Occupy Sandy's myriad forms of movement and emplacement, can help us find a way toward an insurgent infrastructure beyond racial liberalism, one predicated on and productive of a radical reconceptualization of the city and urban citizenship itself.

It is Thursday, November 8, 2012 at St. Jacobi Church in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. It’s a bright, dry day. Just one week earlier, Hurricane Sandy made landfall on the East Coast, ravaging everything in its wake. In New York City, thousands of houses are destroyed or flooded.

After Hurricane Katrina of 2005, New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward became an icon for the failure of recovery efforts and the persistence of inequality and poverty in American society. However, for as long as this community has been marginalized it has been creating advocacy organizations and counter-narratives that battled discrimination and imbued its cultural practices with meaning.

Collaborative authors discuss the "millennial turns" of the Left - "anarchist, democratic, global" - before/during/after Seattle '99, and the shift toward a reimagined socialism in recent decades.

Twenty-first century activists—inspired by recent social movements and criticisms of the “non-profit industrial complex”—have increasingly sought to avoid pursuing their activism through the hierarchical, professionally managed non-profit corporations that have been the norm for social justice organizations since the 1970s

Within hours of Sandy’s landfall, members from the Occupy Wall Street movement—a planned social movement comprised of social activists who protested income inequality in the United States—used social media to tap the wider Occupy network for volunteers and aid. Overnight, a volunteer army of young, educated, tech-savvy individuals with time and a desire to help others emerged.

Following Hurricane Katrina, observers worried that New Orleans might continue on a path of citizen passivity, inter-communal conflict, and corruption that was part of its long-standing reputation. Instead, observers have been struck by the outpouring of citizen engagement, the rise of new or invigorated community organizations, and the calls for government responsiveness.

As disasters increasingly affect a greater proportion of the population with growing strength and frequency it is becoming even more important to comprehend how recovery from these events is mediated and managed by society.

When people ask me, as a climate reporter, what I think will happen next, my answer has been cruel and blasé in its bluntness: "More pandemics." There will be more pandemics, driven by deforestation, habitat destruction, and disease vectors extended due to warming climates, all egged on in their spread by the global nature of our economy. We also know there will be an increase in other kinds of climate disasters: wildfire, drought, hurricane, flood. The future is packed with relentless catastrophe.

This is a study about disasters, vulnerability and power. With regards to social justice organizing a particular research problem guides the work, specifically that emancipatory projects are often initiated and steered by privileged actors who do not belong to the marginalized communities they wish to strengthen, yet the work is based on the belief that empowerment requires self-organizing from within.

Feminist scholars have long argued that a “crisis of care” is characteristic of capitalist societies — capitalism has a tendency to jeopardize and destroy the very process and conditions of social reproduction upon which it depends.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, philanthropy has been quick to react to the call for help from Governments and International Organisations. And yet, despite the overwhelming response, increasing attention has been brought to the intricate ways in which philanthropists and billionaires have been asserting their presence through their actions and influence in different spheres of power.